My Favourite Novelist: Kurt Vonnegut

It was the year 2000 when I said to one person: ‘Do you realise that all years will now start with “2”? All people who’d gone before this year have got both years starting with “1” in their obituary. Those who’ll be going after 2000 will have the year of death starting with “2”‘.

Back then we went off the subject very quickly. I vividly remembered this conversation in April 2007 upon opening Yahoo.com in the web browser and stumbling into ‘Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007′.

The news broke across the world, including Russia, where Vonnegut is admired by many. However, the reason why his exit was one of the main news topics is not simply because he was one of the greatest contemporary authors. Let’s be honest with ourselves: a lot of people haven’t yet read his works. There must be another reason, therefore.

A lot of Vonnegut’s books are fiction. There are no sirens of Titan, no Billy Pilgrim, very little at all – at the first glance – to connect his texts to the “real life”. One may say it’s normal. Today there are readers and critics who believe it is not necessary to actually experience hardships in order to describe them. For this reason, perhaps, some of today’s narratives are very much like reverberations of a second-rate Victorian novel: rather sentimental and lovely, but hardly thought-provoking.

Thankfully, the works of Vonnegut were not “lovely”. Instead, they made a reader think, providing the reader was eager to use their brain to this end. “Thinking” is often being scorned as a superficial activity, but to think is to reflect and also to dream. Every thought follows a path, and every thinker is a traveller who sooner or later realises that their destination is humanism. Neither politics, nor religion, but the progress and the future of mankind.

Deep down every humanist knows that they are nothing but dreamers, and that their many dreams are never to come true, at least not in their lifetime. Still, they dream and put their thoughts to paper, canvas or film because one thing they know for sure: someone somewhere will respond to their dreams by sharing them and passing them on to other dreamers.

The progress of the Man is something that bothers everyone, including those who declare to have no interest in philosophy. What is often forgotten, is that the only way to make the world better is to better oneself, to be true to one’s human nature. And this requires not just a titanic intellectual effort, but above all – empathy.

Many of Vonnegut’s novels could be labelled as science fiction. The first one I read back in 2000 was Cat’s Cradle, a story of a scientific experiment with drastic consequences. Soon after I read The Sirens of Titan, another sci-fi story. A lot of his novels involved scientific experiments, migrations in time, or space journeys. His warning against the hyper-devotion to science and technology is unambiguous. At the same time, as “scientific” was becoming increasinly associated with “virtual” and “unknown”, the outworldly wanderings of Vonnegut’s characters became the manifestations of the postmodern era. The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’ he’d used in Slaughterhouse Five stands close to the technique of collage, favoured by many art movements of the 20th c., including surrealism. The effect of such technique was in replicating the state of mind of a modern man. Fragmented memories, thoughts, emotions, reactions have reflected either a fear of, or indifference to, changes. Used in a sci-fi narrative, such technique conveyed the inadequacy and the irresponsiveness to the motion of life, which, like history (in the words of Paul Virilio), progresses at the speed of the weapon systems.

Slaughterhouse Five has changed completely the way I envisaged the writing about war. It draws on Vonnegut’s personal experience of the World War II, and one can obviously ask, what is there to add to the significance of this novel, apart from its already established literary and historical importance?

The fact is, with all technological changes currently happening on a nearly daily basis, Tralfamadorian dogma has become a reality. It has already been known that the present lasts no longer than a few seconds. To say that we always live in the future is as valid as to say that we always live in the past. Life is increasingly virtual, and so is – apparently – death. The question is, then, what do we make of all this? Are we afraid of, or indifferent to, this rapid progress? And what do we make of the future now that we are so painfully aware that it is already in the past?

Vonnegut knew that the answer was not about who controls who: whether we control technology, or whether technology controls us. The answer was in the destination, and the destination was the progress of the man. If technology served to expand our horizons whereby we may become better people, then it was for the good. If it served to improve our weapons and to help us wage wars quicker than the previous generations could, then something must be wrong.

Daring as he was, Vonnegut was telling true stories, disguising them as fiction. Yet his main message was about the importance of empathy, about the use of one’s intellectual effort to understand and to serve another human being. In The Sirens of Titan he paraphrased a well-known Latin sentence: ‘ an intellectual mountain has produced a philosophical mouse ‘ [ I must admit this is not a quote – it is a “retranslation” of Vonnegut’s phrase in Russian ]. Knowledge is dust, unless it is being used. And in the same novel, at the very end of it, there was another phrase, which the female protagonist pronounces before passing away. ‘ You know ‘, she says’, ‘ it is so good when they use you ‘.

I never read The Sirens of Titan in English, but it is obvious that Vonnegut was not speaking of a person being used selfishly by others. The idea was about being useful to people, and it is as humanist and idealistic a thought as it can be.

I am aware that many great authors will leave us sooner or later, some of whom have impacted me both as a writer and a person. Kurt Vonnegut’s impact was one of the most profound, and a lot of my work since 2001 is in a sense the proof. There was so much knowledge and craving to learn more, yet I couldn’t keep acquiring knowledge just for myself – I wanted to share it as soon as possible. I wanted my knowledge to be useful. I am thankful to Kurt Vonnegut for sharing his ideas with me.


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